Comments by "Patrick Cleburne" (@patrickcleburneuczjsxpmp9558) on "PragerU"
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The war obviously wasn't fought to free slaves. If we're having any kind of honest discussion, then we first need to recognize that for the complete BS myth that it is. If the war had been a war that could be simply summarized as a war over slavery, then (1) both sides wouldn't have practiced slavery throughout the entire war, (2) pro-slavery states, states that voted against the 13th amendment even after the war, wouldn't have fought on the supposedly anti-slavery side, (3) the supposedly anti-slavery side wouldn't have repeatedly and categorically denied any purpose of interfering with slavery, even to the extent of offering to irrevocably amend the constitution to prohibit federal interference with slavery in the slave states, and (4) instead of the North telling the slave states they could keep their slaves if they forfeited their independence, the North would have told the slave states they could have their independence if they freed the slaves. Obviously independence, not slavery, was the central issue. And if slavery was even a secondary issue, it was only a future hypothetical issue, a question of what the North might do in the future, not anything it was doing at the time; neither side went to war making any slavery-related demands whatsoever of the other side.
So the clear and obvious and most direct answer to the question of what caused the war is that South Carolina wanted to govern itself, Buchanan and Lincoln and the North more generally didn't recognize their right to declare independence, and then war broke out over the question of whether South Carolina (and the states that sided with South Carolina, some initially choosing not to secede for the reasons South Carolina seceded but then later choosing to side with the Confederacy only after and in response to Lincoln's call to go to war to force the states that had already seceded back under DC control.)
If the fundamental questions we're getting at are whether the Union was justified in waging war to deny the states' right to secede or whether the Confederacy was justified in fighting for its right to declare independence and self-govern, then the secondary question of what caused South Carolina (or any of the states that followed) to want to declare independence in the first place is ultimately as unimportant to me as the question of why an employee decided to quit his job in the context of a discussion of whether his employer has a right to deny him the right to quit and use force to beat him back into submission.
Combine that fundamental principle (just government requiring the consent of the governed) with the absurd misrepresentations exposed by 4 the slavery-related facts I listed at the beginning, and then any honest person out to be able to see strong reasons for at least seriously doubting (if not outright rejecting) any slavery-based arguments for justifying the Union cause in the war and condemning the Confederate cause in the war.
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@Rebel-cd6gc > Preserve means maintain as is.
Americans in 1776 maintained slavery as is after seceding, so then you're not saying anything about Southerners in 1861 that you couldn't equally accurately say about Americans in 1776. But no one talks about Americans "preserving" slavery in 1776, because no one actually believes the definition you gave of "preserve" makes sense to use.
But preserving actually means more than what you just said. If you talk about canning tomatoes to preserve them you're also necessarily implying that those tomatoes aren't going to be stored in a deep freezer where bacteria wouldn't be active anyway. You're implying that the person canning those tomatoes expects something to happen to the tomatoes if he doesn't can them that he intends to prevent by canning them. And that's the lie you (whether knowingly or foolishly repeating others' lies) are trying to hide behind the dishonest use of those words: the only reason to speak of the South "preserving" slavery is to imply what would clearly be a lie to say directly, namely the lie that the North was trying to abolish slavery.
> attempting to ensure it isn't taken away
And how was seceding any sort of attempt to ensure it wasn't taken away? What's the connection? How are you trying to suggest it could have been taken away if they hadn't seceded, such that it could make any sense to say what you said? Are you trying to suggest, for example, that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery could have been forced on the southern states? But there's zero evidence/mention of an abolition amendment in any of the declarations of causes of secession. There are, of course, plenty of specifics in the declarations, so tell me specifically what could have happened that's specifically described in the declarations of causes that you think seceding was intended to avoid or prevent. Your claim is either just vague nonsense or it's historically baseless and easily disproved.
> Lincoln reassured he would keep it around in order to keep the union. The Southern States didn't trust his words
The declarations of causes say nothing about Lincoln abolishing slavery.
> If Lincoln was running things chances were good that he would stop it.
How could a president have abolished slavery if they hadn't seceded anyway? What an absurd myth! But, please, if you think it's more than an absurd myth, try to flesh it out for me.
> Lincoln had also spoken out against it in a moral sense
And do you think seceding was an attempt to ensure Lincoln didn't continue speaking out against it in a moral sense? Obviously there's no support for your argument there either. And, of course, it's absurd to equate speaking out against it with taking it away, as if a politician speaking out against the opposite party is equal to a politician trying to abolish the opposite party and deport all its members.
> You just have to go through the history of the south afterwards to see how much more inferior they viewed African Americans.
Northerners (including Lincoln) likewise thought blacks were inferior. But you're just arguing with a straw man if you're arguing against the idea that Southerners didn't want to continue practicing slavery. I've already made it very clear that the problem with your argument isn't that the South didn't want to continue practicing slavery; the problem is that Lincoln and the Republican-led North weren't trying to abolish slavery. If they had been trying to abolish slavery, maybe the South would have fought to stop them, but they clearly didn't fight to stop the North from doing what the North wasn't doing in the first place.
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@Ben00000 Presidents? Do you not know how slavery was finally abolished in the US? Presidents play no official role in amending the constitution. Slavery was abolished after most of the legislatures of the former Confederate states (VA, LA, TN, AR, SC, AL, NC, GA), plus the legislatures of another 3 states that were slave states or part of a slave state at the start of the war voted to ratify the amendment abolishing slavery. There was no remotely feasible way the constitution could have been amended to abolish slavery if the slave states hadn't seceded, not until the slave states decided for themselves (whether through a free, uncoerced democratic process or otherwise) to amend the constitution. The complete and total lie that that had been a threat to the slave states that led them to secede is the foundation of the Righteous Cause Myth, though.
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